It's no stretch to say that American allies, including Canada, are praying for a Hillary Clinton presidency. Current White House occupant Barack Obama as much as said so, sharing this confidence from his counterparts at last week's meeting of Group of Seven leaders in Japan: "I think it's fair to say that they are surprised by the Republican nominee. They are not sure how seriously to take some of his pronouncements. But they're rattled by him, and for good reason because a lot of the proposals that he's made display either ignorance of world affairs or a cavalier attitude."
To that, the rogue GOP nominee, replied: "The countries in our world … have been absolutely abusing us and taking advantage of us. If they're rattled in a friendly way, that's a good thing."
Only in Donald Trump's skewed world view could "rattling" your friends be considered a positive. Firmly asking your allies to assume their fair share of the burden for advancing your mutual foreign-policy interests is entirely legitimate. Threatening them with abandoning decades-old alliances and trade agreements and blowing up the postwar international system if they don't is just plain reckless.
Mr. Trump's blusterous comments may be mere posturing. But he has repeatedly shown he is willing to say anything, regardless of the damage it does to U.S. relations with the Muslim world, Mexico, Japan or Europe, to bolster his populist appeal. That makes him an unpredictable and undependable partner in the eyes of American allies.
Ms. Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, is a known quantity. The former U.S. secretary of state, senator and first lady has more foreign-policy experience than any presidential candidate in modern history. She understands the internal politics and external ambitions of U.S. friends and rivals alike. To the friends, she offers reassurance. China, Russia and Iran, meanwhile, would know better than to test or provoke her.
As Robert Gates, who served as U.S. defence secretary under both Mr. Obama and George W. Bush, told New York Times journalist Mark Landler: "This is a tough lady."
Mr. Landler, who has just written a fascinating book titled Alter Egos about the relationship between Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton when she ran the State Department, concludes that her "foreign-policy instincts are bred in the bone – grounded in cold realism about human nature and what one aide calls 'a textbook view of American exceptionalism.'"
Between Mr. Bush's tendency to meddle everywhere and Mr. Obama's aversion to meddling anywhere, Ms. Clinton is the Goldilocks of the trio from a foreign-policy perspective. Where Mr. Obama is skeptical of America's ability to bring order to a disordered world, his former secretary of state wants to at least try.
Ms. Clinton's view of the United States as a force for good in the world was born of her upbringing as the daughter of a Republican Navy petty officer during the 1950s, a period of peak U.S. power. Unlike Mr. Obama, she is like a fish in water in military settings, talking shop with generals. Indeed, she gravitates to them rather than to former diplomats in the Washington foreign-policy establishment when she wants advice. Mr. Landler recounts her visit, as a New York senator, to an upstate military base shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks, which she began by asking her host: "General, do you know where a gal can get a cold beer around here?"
Her interventionist bent remains intact despite the chaos that has engulfed Libya since she pushed Mr. Obama into military action to topple Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. At the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, wrote former State Department official Jeffrey Stacey recently in Foreign Affairs magazine, she would have intervened to arm the Free Syrian Army and imposed a no-fly zone to prevent President Bashar al-Assad from bombing the rebels.
"This would have prevented Russia from entering the conflict and tipping its outcome in Assad's favour," Mr. Stacey writes. Ms. Clinton's plan to deploy a United Nations peacekeeping force in Syria following Mr. Assad's ouster, he adds, "would have prevented [the Islamic State] from taking root in the country and could have led to a stable and successful transition of power."
Ms. Clinton hasn't given up on Libya or Syria. But while opinion polls show voters trust her far more than Mr. Trump in foreign-policy matters, the weary mood of the electorate favours his isolationism over her liberal internationalism. Hillary the Hawk may have her timing all wrong.
Konrad Yakabuski